Subjects: The Albanese Government’s half-baked Defence recruitment policy; the International Criminal Court; nuclear energy; the Government’s energy policy shambles; Labor’s ongoing immigration detention shambles; migration; Labor’s big Australia policy; the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………………
PETER DUTTON:
Thank you very much for being here this afternoon.
I wanted to make some comments in relation to this half-baked policy that the Government’s put out, which would propose the biggest change to the Defence Force recruitment in our country’s history. There’s not a discussion paper, you’ve got Ministers saying one thing and another Minister saying something else. You’ve got a briefing that was provided this morning, which is at odds with what the Minister is now saying.
I think we need to have some definite detail from the Prime Minister who couldn’t even answer the question in Question Time today. I think this is a Government that is losing its way. I think the Australian public can attest to that.
There’s no Australian today who was better off than they were two years ago. The Government’s presided over three budgets, they’ve forced up inflation, and as the Reserve Bank Governor points out, they are the masters of that inflationary environment, which is leading to higher interest rates, made it more difficult for families, more difficult for small businesses, and now we’ve got Minister Marles at odds with Minister Keogh. We don’t know the detail, and it’s going to be passed by way of regulation. We know from the Director-General of ASIO that we operate in an environment where there is an incredibly high level of foreign interference. That’s the case in Five Eyes countries more generally. We don’t know the full detail of how many people, although Minister Keogh mentioned the figure of 325 or 350 or something a year that might come in through this programme – we don’t know if it’s capped at that. Richard Marles doesn’t mention that figure. When Richard Marles had a train wreck interview on 3AW today, he won’t go into the detail that Minister Keogh’s gone into.
It’s a dog’s breakfast, and it comes off the back of the most disastrous performance I’ve seen in a long time from Minister Giles, who, if that’s the ministerial standard that Anthony Albanese is prepared to set, then I don’t think a Minister in the Albanese Government could be sacked for anything.
What we see at the moment is a Government in chaos, and they’re lurching from one disaster to the next, and I think it’s no wonder that Australians are starting to lose faith in a Prime Minister that they see as completely weak and incompetent.
I’ll ask Andrew and Phil to say a few words, and then I’m happy to take questions.
ANDREW HASTIE:
Thanks Peter.
Well, under the Albanese Government we are facing an ADF recruitment and retention crisis. We can’t get enough people into the ADF and we can’t keep the people that we currently have, and the ADF currently is about 5,000 people short of its full fighting force. It’s got to grow out to 2040, and the trend line is that it’s going to get worse over the next 15 years.
Today, as Peter said, Labor’s plan to recruit migrants into the Defence Force is a half-baked idea. There was no debate, there was no discussion, they’ve just dropped this this morning without any notice, and I think the Australian people have a right to know exactly what their plan is.
From January 1, we’re told permanent residents who’ve lived in Australia for a year are able to join the ADF, and then within 90 days will take full citizenship. What are the security vetting processes that will be applied? Is there a return of service obligation on these people who get citizenship through the ADF? I can tell you over the road at ADFA, cadets who study there, for every year of study they do, they pay back the Commonwealth with a year of service plus one, and we want to have clarity around this process. But really, what it really tells you is that Labor have given up on the task of fixing the recruitment and retention process. They’ve given up. They’re not appealing to young Australians. Servicing the ADF is one of the most exciting, rewarding, challenging things a young Australian can do, and they have not made that argument at all.
Over the next decade and beyond, we are growing our capabilities across air, sea and land. AUKUS is going to be a massive nation building endeavour, and again, the Prime Minister, Richard Marles, they haven’t made the argument, they haven’t an appealed to young Australians.
I can tell you, under a Peter Dutton led Coalition Government, we’ll be asking young Australians who want a challenge, who are tough, who are resilient, who want to serve their country, who want to undertake the most complex, demanding missions: there’s a place for you in the ADF, and we’ll look after you with the right incentives, we’ll make sure your family life is balanced, we’ll make sure that you are doing rewarding work that you can believe in and that your family can believe in, and the country will support you. That’s the point of difference between us and Labor.
I’ll hand over to Phil now. Thank you.
PHILLIP THOMPSON:
Well, I served in the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, based in Townsville, deployed to East Timor and to Afghanistan. I was wounded in Afghanistan, and if I wasn’t wounded in combat, I probably would still be in the ADF right now. My cohort are Platoon Sergeants and WO2s that are serving right now, and I often speak with them and say, ‘how’s the morale?’, ‘How are you going?’, ‘What do you need?’, I can tell you that morale is low.
We have young soldiers who are getting out at a rapid rate. We have people that don’t want to join, and this idea from this Labor Government is to not address that issue. It’s not to go out and speak to the people that are affected by the high rates of discharge and ask them what they need? What they want? And how that can be supported? It’s to come up with this idea that they haven’t explained to anyone.
I can’t remember the last time the Defence Minister, or the Minister for Defence Personnel sat down with soldiers and said, ‘what do you need?’, ‘How can we help you?’, ‘Why do you want to stay in, or why do you want to get out?’. We haven’t heard that. We haven’t seen that. We’ve got a lot of discussion with the senior echelon of Defence, and whilst there’s a time for that, we don’t have a high exit rate of the Generals, we have a high exit rate of the soldiers, the sailors and the aviators.
We need to be looking inwards at why our people want to stay? How do we help them stay? Because if you don’t have a Government that stands up for you, if you don’t have a Government that stands beside you, if you don’t have a Government that supports you, then you don’t get people wanting to join.
We need a Government that stands up for our brave men and women who put on the uniform every day, because one day, someday, we’re going to have brave men and women potentially on the battlefield, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, side-by-side with our allies, and they want a Government that will stand up and go, ‘we support you’.
To get those people in, to ensure that we’re doing the right thing, we need this Government to get out of the cold weather of Canberra and into the regions and into the places that have these soldiers, sailors and aviators.
This is a half-cocked, half-baked policy that hasn’t been explored at all, and the people that are in right now are sitting there going, ‘well, this doesn’t help us. Why are we going to be serving?’. And it’s a damn shame that this Labor Prime Minister couldn’t answer the simple question given to him by Andrew Hastie. I think that instead of cowering away and hiding away, the Prime Minister should be standing here discussing exactly what this policy is, and what it means to the current serving men and women right now. Because hiding away and not answering it and fluffing around like the part time Defence Minister did today, just shows that they’re not up to the job in supporting our ADF.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, on a matter of Coalition policy, could you please clarify what the Coalition policy is on walking away or cutting ties with the International Criminal Court? And secondly, your call to put pressure on the ICC to make sure they reverse this terrible decision regarding arrest warrants or proposed arrest warrants. How is that consistent with Article 70 of the Rome Statute, which prohibits impeding or intimidating officials of the Court?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I think it’s important for Australians to have faith in a body that could ultimately decide guilt or innocence of our men and women from the Australian Defence Force. If they were charged with particular offences, that might come before the court, we would want to have faith in the process, that there wasn’t a political influence or there wasn’t an ideological position that was being taken. We would want to have faith in the rule of law, the international rule of law being applied fairly and without discrimination. If we didn’t have faith in that process, I’d be surprised if the Prime Minister signed up to that arrangement. So, I think that’s what is most important here. We want to make sure that we protect men and women of the Australian Defence Force. The Coalition’s always done that, and that’s the basis.
I think their position in relation to Israel is an appalling one, and I think the decision that’s been taken is not one that’s objective, to try and provide some sort of moral equivalence between Hamas – a listed terrorist organisation, and Israel – a democratic country that lost 1,200 people who were slaughtered by that terrorist organisation and a terrorist organisation that still holds women and children in a tunnel network as hostages. I think reasonable questions are to be asked.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, back on the ADF recruitment, the Defence Minister’s office has clarified now that from January 1, the recruitment is only for Five Eyes partners, does that allay your concerns? And don’t you risk politicising what is a sensitive national security matter?
PETER DUTTON:
No it’s not. I mean Matt Keogh…I watched the footage of him; he was up in the hallway in the Gallery earlier today – some of you would have been there. He said that it applies to the Five Eyes nations and all other nations. Right? so, that is the whole world. Unless there’s some other definition…
QUESTION:
But that’s been clarified now by the Defence Minister’s office.
PETER DUTTON:
But what is going on? I mean the Prime Minister can’t utter a single word in relation to this issue when he’s asked about it in Question Time today. Minister Marles in his 3AW interview was all over the place and it was a complete mess. Minister Keogh is out there telling you that it’s going to apply to every nation. They’re now saying, ‘oh, well, we’re winding it back in, it’ll only apply to some nations, but maybe not others. Maybe some people from Five Eyes, but not others’. I mean, this is the biggest proposal to change the recruitment process to the Australian Defence Force in our country’s history. We’re talking about making sure that we have the quality of people going into the Australian Defence Force, as we’ve had in the past. You can have lateral transfers at the moment from Five Eyes countries, particularly for people with specialist skills who might come into the SAS, might be divers, might be nuclear submariners, all of that happens now. But the Government’s gone out there proposing the biggest change. We’re up to version four or five, and we’re not even up to the nightly news.
So, I think we should see a paper released from the Government which has some authority. If Minister Keogh doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and Richard Marles is all over the place as the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, well where on earth is Anthony Albanese? Can the Prime Minister take responsibility for anything? Can he explain any public policy that they’ve put forward comprehensively? There’s no evidence of it so far. So I hope that an explanation could be provided.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, are you also here to tell Australians where the Coalition wants to put nuclear power plants? You and your colleagues talk about Australians’ ‘right to know’ – where are they going to go?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we’ve said that the sites that we’re looking at are coal fired power stations that have come to end of life…
QUESTION:
Where exactly?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I’ve answered that in relation to – we’ll make that announcement in due course. We don’t dance to Chris Bowen or The Saturday’s tune or anything like that. We listen to…
QUESTION:
You did promise the sites pre-Budget.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, if you have a look at where the Government is at the moment, they’re not meeting their renewables targets, prices are going up, reliability is now questionable. The prospect of them reaching their net zero by 2050 target diminishes as each day goes by, and you’ve got a train wreck of an energy policy from this Government that is seeing manufacturing close at a three fold rate over the course of the last two years, because those companies can’t get cheap and secure energy in our country.
Now, if Chris Bowen has a proper explanation about where the baseload will come from, that is if you don’t like coal and you don’t like gas – they now do like gas a little bit more than they did 12 months ago, and they are, I mean, Labor Governments are negotiating to extend coal fired power stations, as we speak – where does the baseload come from? If you’re talking about green hydrogen – green hydrogen is under investigation and money’s been put into research and development, but it’s not prospective in the current environment, and we have to have stability in our energy system, we have to have cheaper electricity, we have to have consistent electricity, we have to have cleaner electricity and that is exactly the policy that we’re working up.
Interestingly, as you look at poll after poll, the majority of Australians are prepared to have a mature conversation about this. But some on the left in the gallery and most now who are on the left in the Labor Party, are still pretending like they’re at university. Let’s just have a mature conversation about what’s in our country’s best interest. That’s what I have in mind and that’s the debate that we’ll have, and we’ll do it in due course.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, obviously, if the vetting of other country’s citizens or permanent residents here to join the Defence Force doesn’t go ahead, there will still be significant retention issues within the ADF. So what would the Coalition do differently to have the retention issues there? Because if this doesn’t go ahead, there’s still going to be that decline with the Defence Force.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, we wouldn’t gut Army, which is what Anthony Albanese’s doing at the moment. He’s ripping money out of Army to put into AUKUS, which was never the plan. The Government’s spoken about putting more money into the ADF. They’re just not doing it. It’s exactly a repeat of what we saw when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were in government. They stripped money out of defence. We put, for example, $10 billion into the Australian Signals Directorate because we accepted the advice on the cyber security threat to our systems of national significance and importance, and also to the data held by companies, particularly the personal data relating to Australian citizens.
Now, the Government, at the moment, has a huge morale problem as Andrew and Phil pointed out before, because they don’t value the service of the Australian Defence Force personnel, and that is evidenced by this botched announcement today. If you value and respect, truly value and respect the effort of the Australian men and women who wear our uniform, you don’t start to cheapen the entry price to get into the Australian Defence Force. That’s exactly what the Prime Minister has done today and it’s an outrage.
QUESTION:
On the AAT, Mr Dutton, we’ve learned today about that the tribunal yesterday made a decision – this was highlighted in Question Time – the man at the centre of that decision, Mr Farrugia – he was first charged with firearms offenses, convicted in 2018 when you were the Minister. Why didn’t you cancel his visa on character grounds at the time, if that’s such a serious situation? And secondly, would you like to see the AAT pause consideration of section 501 cases until the new direction is in place?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, there’s a bit in that.
First of all, I mean the Government’s trotting out these cases. I cancelled 6,300 visas, and obviously looked at more than that. So, I’m very happy to look at the detail. I know when, with respect, when David published all of that detail, he didn’t have the detail of the individual cases. The Government still hasn’t released that. So, to be fair, the Government’s under mounting pressure and I think Andrew Giles is a dead man walking – but we know the details of those cases because they’ve been put out into the public domain, and you can discuss the merit of whether he should have cancelled, or shouldn’t have cancelled a particular case. Trotting out names and an offence and a date, doesn’t give it context. I’d be very happy to look at any of the cases because…
QUESTION:
This was the one that was highlighted in Question Time.
PETER DUTTON:
Interestingly, the Government’s spent the last decade telling Australians how tough I was and how I was ruthless in cancelling 6,300 visas. Now they’re trying to tell the Australian public that I was a soft touch. It just doesn’t make sense. All it is, is a giant smokescreen from one of the most incompetent Immigration Ministers, probably since Chris Bowen and Tony Burke and Brendan O’Connor and Chris Evans, when people drowned at sea and they put women and kids into detention.
I’m happy to have my record compared to any Labor Minister since federation. I’ve cancelled more visas since federation than any Minister in that portfolio. In some cases, I took legal advice about cancelling a visa. I was, in some cases, given the advice that constitutionally, there was nothing further we could do in relation to particular cases. I never watered down any laws and I’m very happy to have the discussion, but be properly informed instead of just trotting out the Government’s lines…
QUESTION:
But it was the Coalition that raised this matter today in Question Time, raised the matter of Kevin Farrugia.
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I’m answering this question…
QUESTION:
Yep, it’s the same matter.
PETER DUTTON:
So, I think we should see the detail of the particular brief. I’m happy to look at the brief and have a look at the detail, but it’s a smokescreen, right? And to be honest, 95 per cent of the media aren’t reporting it because it’s a nonsense argument.
This is about Andrew Giles and the decisions he’s made which have led to Australians being harmed, to more victims. He says that people have been continuously monitored. What does that even mean? Because these people are out committing offences. So, if they’re continuously monitored – does he have the footage of these people from the imaginary drones that are up in the sky? Is he going to sack his Secretary because of the consistent failure of advice offered to him? I never blamed my Department for advice that I got because I was a competent Minister and Giles is a disgrace. Frankly, it reflects very poorly on the Prime Minister that he would tolerate having such an incompetent person in his portfolio.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, you’ve proposed a 25 per cent cut to Australia’s migration intake in your Budget In Reply speech. What share of that will come from foreign students and what will come from other temporary visas?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, a couple of points. I mean the Government’s brought over 900,000 people over two years, and only built 265,000 homes. So, no wonder we’ve got a housing crisis in our country. You’ve got housing approvals at an 11 year low, and the Government now is putting at the top of the list yoga teachers, and knocking off the list carpenters, bricklayers, and other tradespeople. It’s a nonsense.
This Government is a walking disaster. We’ve got a housing crisis. You’ve got the Government bringing in a million people, only building a quarter of a million homes. Our argument is that you should reduce the numbers over two years, gradually increase it once housing starts to catch back up, and that would allow more Australians to get into homes.
In terms of the composition of the programme, well again, it depends on the economic advice at the time. A lot of credible economists out there from big companies and others that we’ve spoken to, who really talk about a negative second half, unfortunately, in the economy this year and that is because of the Government’s three budgets. They haven’t been able to handle the economic conditions before them, and unfortunately, Australians pay the price yet again for the economic incompetence.
QUESTION:
Given what you’ve just said there, Mr Dutton, would you prioritise construction workers and tradies in the reduced intake that you have?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes. We have already made an announcement that they would be at the top of our list. We want to see more of those tradies coming in because, as everyone knows, the cost to build a house in our country has gone up dramatically and there are a number of reasons. If you listen to MBA and others, part of that is obviously because of labour costs, of supply shortages, etc…
I might also say, and it’s not a discussion that’s had frequently enough in our country, but the CFMEU now have trashed productivity within the building sector. You’ve got – particularly in Victoria and Queensland, but to a lesser extent in New South Wales and elsewhere – prices being set which are astronomical, and it’s got a flow on effect into the residential space as well. That’s why people can’t find a builder for love nor money and can’t get a house built on a fixed price contract. All of that is sanctioned by the Prime Minister because, of course, that’s the unions.
QUESTION:
Mr Dutton, on Defence recruiting, we’ve had some terrible evidence from the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides. Is there an argument that successive Governments haven’t invested enough in supporting the people in Defence? What do you say to that argument and what role might that have played in recruitment?
PETER DUTTON:
I agree with that argument, and I think there have been many mistakes made over many decades. We need to do better to provide support to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force. Those who are serving and those who have served, and to lower the standards of entry, and to lower the entry requirements in the way that the Government is proposing, regardless of which version you look at, that is cheapening what should be a vocation that every Australian looks up to and respects. Every Australian should be thankful that we live in the country that we do, and we live in this country in peace and safety and we’re respected around the world because of the men and women who have and who are currently serving our country in uniform.
So yes, there is more that we need to do. But when you look at the decisions the Government’s made, they don’t pay respect to those men and women, particularly by ripping resources and functions and tasks away from Army, in particular. I think the Government’s made a catastrophic mistake.
Now, if we can find out the detail of what it is they’re proposing, I think we can have a discussion across the country about whether this is the right pathway for our country to take, but the Prime Minister needs to show leadership here and stand up, put out a discussion paper. Let’s have, again, a mature discussion about the merits of what they’re proposing and the unintended consequences. What it means, particularly in terms of foreign interference in our country and elsewhere? There are so many aspects to this that are worthy of debate and the Prime Minister couldn’t even give us a word in Question Time today.
Thank you very much.
[ends]